Op-ed: The simple, portable, and long-lasting UE Roll succeeds where others have failed.

I know that portable Bluetooth speakers are hardly the sexiest or most technologically interesting gadgets out there, but indulge me for a moment. The trouble with most portable Bluetooth speakers is that they are, almost universally, completely and utterly terrible. The cheap ones—the £10-£30 (say, $15 to $45) piles of garishly coloured plastic that you can buy from places like Amazon—are about as enjoyable to listen to as having a swarm of bees repeatedly attack your ear lobes, such is the tinny mess they try to pass off as music.

But worse—far, far worse in my book—are the expensive ones. I can forgive cheap speakers for being terrible; put it all down to case of "you get what you pay for." But spending serious amounts of money and still ending up with something that sounds awful? As they say in here in Blightly, that's just not cricket. It's not like my expectations are particularly high, either. A portable Bluetooth speaker is never going to be an audiophile's dream. What's weird, however, is that even though these speakers are being made by fancy design houses, they inexplicably lack basic, fundamental features that a good Bluetooth speaker must have.

Those basics are simple. First, give me a small, portable design that's easy to lug around to hotels, picnics, parties, and the like. Combine that with an uncomplicated pairing system, a battery that lasts a good eight hours or more, and—most importantly—a speaker that sounds good at quiet volumes while remaining distortion free when cranked to fill a room. So far, scant few have managed to tick all the boxes. The Bluetooth speakers I've tried—the Beats Pill, the Anker Portable, the Sony SRS-X11, and the JBL Flip 2—have all come up short in one way or another.

The Pill, which goes for a substantial £120 ($135) online, sounds particularly awful. At low volumes, it lacks clarity and, oddly enough for Beats product, decent bass. When you crank it to a not particularly impressive volume, it even distorts. And while it didn't affect the regular Pill, those that purchased its bigger brother the XL had the worry that it might spontaneously combust too.

Recently, The Wirecutter named the £99 ($99) UE Mini Boom as "the best portable Bluetooth speaker," and I was intrigued. When Logitech purchased Ultimate Ears for $34 million (£22 million) in cash back in 2008, it was a largely a maker of high-end earphones and custom moulded monitors, not a purveyor of mass-market consumer tech. Despite being a paid-up customer of its Triple Fi earphones and then its excellent quad-driver UE900 earphones, it simply hadn't occurred to me that UE might also be making some decent Bluetooth speakers.

The UE Roll is just a little bigger than a CD.

Mark Walton

Round the back there's a carry loop for lugging the UE Roll around all those sexy parties you definitely always go to.

Mark Walton

A fiddly rubber flap hides the charging port and 3.5mm jack for hooking up a device with ye olde cables.

Mark Walton

There are two huge plus and minus buttons on the top of the UE Roll, which are used to adjust the volume.

The UE Roll is available in a variety of colours/designs, though they're all quite garish.

Well, it turns out that UE is making very good Bluetooth speakers indeed, and not just in the form of the UE Mini Boom. The UE Roll—its smaller, lighter, and more rugged cousin—is a thing of beauty. The saucer-shaped speaker fits in the palm of a (admittedly slightly larger than average) hand, it carries an IPX7 rating for being submerged in a metre of water for up to 30 minutes, and—in my usage at least—the battery lasts just shy of eight hours. Most importantly for a speaker at £80 ($99), it sounds really, really good.

No, the UE Roll won't win any awards for accuracy or detail, but it paid attention where it counts. Music sounds great and retains its clarity all the way up to the speaker's impressively loud top volume, and the UE Roll is absurdly loud for a speaker of its size. To my ear, there's definitely some sort of frequency tuning wizardry happening to emphasise the vocal ranges for clarity, unlike the Beats Pill, which tends to sound muddy.

Bass is pretty good or, rather, there's a sensible amount of it. The low-end frequency response is rated at 108Hz instead of the usual 20Hz, and while that means you might miss out on the sub-bass of a particularly banging dubstep track, for most listening it works well. Bass guitars in particular tend to live around the 120Hz mark, and they sound clear without any of the flub you tend to get from lesser speakers. The narrower frequency response also means that, when cranked, the speaker doesn't buckle under the pressure and start distorting.

Further Reading

Basically, I love this little thing. It's not perfect by any means: the Saved by the Bell looks aren't for everyone, and it's a bit annoying fiddling with the rubber, waterproofing flap every time it needs charging. And it's worth mentioning this takes a long time to charge (around five hours for a full top-up). But so far at least, it's as close as anyone's gotten to my ideal portable speaker. And if you happen to have two UE Rolls, you can use the UE app to pair them together and spread out the sound.

There are other viable options, of course. The Bose SoundLink is particularly well reviewed, although substantially bigger. And the similarly well-reviewed Jawbone Jambox costs more—around £120 ($150). But I'm interested to know what you guys think, particularly I'm on a mission to find the perfect Bluetooth speaker. Is there a particular Bluetooth speaker out there that you think is the bee’s knees? Or is this just one of those categories where a £30 budget box will do?